In the field of integrated circuit (IC) devices, there is a customer driven motivation to remove quartz and resonator components from application boards in order to reduce space and cost, and to replace them with embedded RC oscillators. For low cost applications such as Local Interconnect Network (LIN) applications, conventional embedded RC oscillator implementations have been able to provide sufficiently stable performance over temperature variations to fulfil the less stringent requirements of such low cost applications. However, there is increasing motivation to use embedded RC oscillators within applications such as CAN (controller area network) applications. Therefore, the embedded RC oscillators must be stable enough over temperature to fulfil the stringent maximum bit rate deviation allowed by, for example, the CAN protocol.
There are various different ways to calibrate an embedded RC oscillator in production. To achieve a high stability of the output frequency across the whole temperature range, temperature compensation schemes must be used. Some of them require more time and memory resources than others. In order to minimise costs, die size and power consumption there is a continuous need for temperature compensation schemes that reduce the required memory resources whilst maintaining the stability of the output frequency for the embedded RC oscillators over required temperature ranges.